Perfecting Out of Home Measurement: An Interview with Clear Channel’s Andy Stevens.

Clear Channel Outdoor Americas has improved its RADAR OOH (Out of Home) insights and analytics tool by adding Cuebiq’s real-time mobile analytics and location data. The value? Location, location, location. More technically, “location insights and footfall attribution analysis based on aggregated and anonymized mobile location data, to identify audiences exposed to CCOA’s printed and digital billboards,” per Andy Stevens, Senior Vice President Research, Insights and Analytics, Clear Channel Outdoor. Stevens has a deep background in Silicon Valley with stints at ShareThis and AOL and now, at CCOA, he is tasked with developing strategies to drive ROI growth for the company and its clients.

This exclusive interview with Stevens provided details on this ground-breaking initiative:

Charlene Weisler: Please give us an overview of Clear Channel Outdoor RADAR.

Andy Stevens: Here’s the elevator pitch: Clear Channel Outdoor RADAR uses mobile location data to identify the audiences that have been exposed to billboards. There is complexity in how we translate anonymous aggregated location data that comes from various sources like mobile ad exchanges or directly from apps, but fundamentally the goal is to understand the viewing audience, which then allows us to offer better targeting for advertisers because we know which billboards best reach your target customer. It also allows us to deliver measureable results so we can show you what user behaviors the campaign actually generated.

Charlene Weisler: Is Clear Channel the sole partner of Cuebiq’s OOH data?

Andy Stevens: Yes. They work in other sectors but we are their exclusive partner using data for Out of Home.

Charlene Weisler: What is footfall attribution? How does it work and why is it important?

Andy Stevens: It’s measuring the impact that the campaign has on store visits; people physically going into stores. It’s important because, despite the huge transformative growth of online commerce, 85% of what is bought is still bought offline. That’s a stat from the National Retail Federation. So for marketers, being able to measure the impact their campaign has on real world store visits is incredibly important. It’s particularly transformative for businesses where the location is the key signal of intent. Think about a gym; the measure is that people go there. Same for a QSR; for the most part, people visit the restaurant to buy something. We can measure that foot traffic and show if it has been driven by exposure to an OOH ad.

Charlene Weisler: What has been the benefit of adding Cuebiq?

Andy Stevens: When we rolled out Clear Channel Outdoor RADAR early last year, we knew the location data landscape would continue to grow. We designed CCO RADAR to be sure that we could continue to evolve as new data sources became available and Cuebiq represents the next generation of location data. They not only have large scale data – about 60 million devices – but the data is persistent. They continually measure location data so they know where those devices are. That’s really important for OOH because we need to be able to understand if someone definitely went past a billboard to be able to measure the performance of the ad against them. 

So let’s say you are driving from Manhattan to Jersey City and you didn’t open an app on your phone. Traditional location data sources relied on the ad calls from apps, so we wouldn’t have known that that person made that journey if they didn’t open up an app when they got there. With Cuebiq we now have a persistent anonymized data source at much greater scale than we ever had before. And we now offer more martkets, more detailed metrics - cutting the results by demographics, time of day, day of week and we receivethe results more quickly. In the past we worked on a two to three week turnaround. Now it is two to three days. And we have lower costs.

Charlene Weisler: Can you give an example with an advertiser?

Andy Stevens: Let’s take that gym example: 24 Hour Fitness campaign used location data in two different ways – for planning purposes and for attribution. For planning, they had two target audiences – current 24 Hour Fitness customers and competitive gym customers. We used RADAR data to identify which locations best reached those targets and then identifed the best billboard locations in LA and San Francisco for a highly targeted campaign. The measure of success was whether we could drive more visits to the gym for both target groups. After the 8 week period of the campaign, we measured footfall attribution comparing those who were exposed to the ad and those who were not. We saw a 248% lift in visits. That is really impressive!

Charlene Weisler: Will this help facilitate cross platform measurement and if so, how?

Andy Stevens: We absolutely have our eye on that. Marketers need to better understand not just each channel in a silo but how the entire marketing mix impacts performance. The Cuebiq data is a big part of that because it gives us sufficient scale to be able to sync anonymous mobile ad ids with third party data sets. That’s how digital advertising is measured. We are putting OOH on the same playing field.

Charlene Weisler: What are some areas that still need to be added to your system?

Andy Stevens: We’re contunally adding more metrics and more behaviors into CCO RADAR. But we don’t identify people as specific individuals. We  use the anonymous mobile ad id which brings us into the digital data ecosystem. This is how digital advertising has been so successful because it uses anonymous ids. The first behaviors we looked at with CCO RADAR were offline behaviors. Going beyond footfall, we can now measure tune-in or understand what apps they may use by interfacing with third party data sets to enhance our targeting capabilites.

Charlene Weisler: How many markets do you reach?

Andy Stevens: We’re in 43 of the 50 largest markets in the United States and 140 airports, and that includes street furniture and roadside inventory. But we can’t measure moving ads, such as on a bus, because they change location.

Charlene Weisler:  Where do you see OOH measurement three years from now?

Andy Stevens: We know we have great OOH locations and we know we can provide excellent targeting with the largest creative formats, it’s unskippable – all of the inherenet benefits of out of home.What has held us back in the past is that people couldn’t measure outcomes and lacked the sophisticated analytics and behavioral intelligence to establish where to buy. Today we can connect all of the technologies that are being used to measure advertising performance across the board. The more we can do that in the future the closer OOH will be to the level of digital adverising. And we already have a programmatic component  for our digital inventory. We will continue to do that to make advertising easier and easier to buy.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com